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I am a high school senior. This class is great. Sadly, poetry is often taught in middle/high school as a boring and stuffy subject. I used to hate poetry because that's how it was presented to me -- all we were taught to do was count meter and determine scansion, and we never explored poems that were particularly heart-rendering or uplifting, only what was given in our textbooks as examples of iambic pentameter and whatnot. I only took this class because I had stumbled across some spoken word poetry videos and found those interesting. Deciding to give other forms of poetry a try as well, I decided to take this class as a way of learning how to approach those tricky "modern" poets, those who I thought wrote weird poems that often didn't rhyme and had no consistent pattern. How, I wondered, is that poetry? This class was perfect in guiding me to understanding those poems I previously found confusing, as well as other contemporary/modern poems that did things I had never seen before (such as Bishop's "A Recollection). Although my schoolwork and college applications make it hard to watch the videos during the week, I'm able to catch up on the weekends. I'm very glad that I enrolled in this class, and would encourage anyone reading this to do the same. Poetry is really a great art that I believe is often forgotten buried under other matters in our fast- paced society. Take this course and discover what you've been missing.